The New YorkerModify

“I Turned $10 Into $1,000,000 in One Week—Here’s How!”

I very slowly added five zeroes and two commas.

She Rubbed an Onion on Her Face Every Morning—the Results Changed Her Life

Nobody wanted to hang out with her.

See What These Celebrities Looked Like WAY Before They Were Famous

[Photos of zygotes]

The One Text That Will Make Your Ex Come Crawling Back to You

“I bet that you can’t fit under this table.”

This Woman Found a Wedding Ring in a Restaurant—What She Did Next Left Everyone Speechless

She gave them laryngitis.

What Is This Child Star Doing Now? The Answer Will Blow Your Mind!

She’s a completely normal and well-adjusted adjunct professor who spends every Thanksgiving with her extended family and just ran a half-marathon.

Some of the Sheets Celebrities Sleep on Will Shock You

Especially if there’s a lot of static electricity in the air.

They Laughed When She Sat Down at the Piano—But Then She Started to Play

And they continued laughing.

This Incredible “Four Cs” Diet Will Boost Your Energy and Drop Your Weight

It’s coffee, cigarettes, and crack cocaine.

These Celebrities Are So Hot, It’s Driving Everyone Mad!

Somebody please let them out of the sweat lodge.

When You See a Photo of This Dog, Your World View Will Be Changed Completely

[Photo of a dog sitting on a Dymaxion map of Earth]

This Common Kitchen Ingredient Could Save Your Life

It’s a glass of water.

The Homes of These Former Celebrities Will Make You Really, Really Sad

Because they’re still way nicer than where you live.

These Simple Hacks Will Solve All Your Character Flaws

[List of screenwriters from the “Fast & Furious” movies]

Slideshow of the Most Famous Actors Currently in the Closet

They’re picking out their clothes for the day.

Use This Calculator to Figure Out When You’ll Be Able to Retire

Never.

Check Out This Famous, Hot Singer Blowing This Famous, Hot Football Player

… a kiss.

Newly Discovered Medieval Document Reveals Secret to Losing Ten Pounds in One Day

Have a barber chop off your arm.

Where Does Your Home Town Rank Among America’s Worst Places?

As compiled by Gnostics, who consider the material world to be a fundamentally terrible place.

You’ve Never Seen Anything Like These Photos of Celebrities Screwing

Habitat for Humanity is grateful to their famous volunteers.

100 Can’t-Miss Movies Streaming Right Now on Netflix (Slideshow)

Which will consume any time or desire you had to actually watch one of them.

The Secret About Your Savings That Banks Don’t Want You to Know

Wealth is theft.

Sure, That Happened, But Nobody Could’ve Predicted THIS Happening

You clicking on this link, thinking that it was going to lead to something interesting. ♦

If you’ve been going to the theatre lately, you’ve seen plenty of what I’ve started to think of as “piñata plays.” In this sort of story, a big family gets together and there are a lot of secrets. For most of the evening, the mood is darkly funny and a little ominous, as the siblings take undermining jabs and the in-laws roll their eyes. Then, in the final act, there’s a hugely satisfying, usually drunken throwdown in which every single person gets to take a whack at the piñata. All the secrets pour out, the revelations of infidelity and addiction and so on, as the group gives vent to the stuff that’s previously been unsayable—not to fix anything, mind you, since some things can’t be fixed.

These plays are often brilliant, and even lesser variants are fun to watch, because piñata-whacking itself is a naughty thrill, a cathartic fantasy for anyone with a family and/or a secret. But there’s something equally pleasurable—and more rare—about a play that pulls off the opposite trick, that revels in the way family members can love one another, can stay connected and build instead of destroying, even amid loss and uncertainty. It’s a hard thing to make dramatic and an easy thing to make corny, but it’s as authentic a theme as dysfunction. In the buoyant revival of Clare Barron’s 2014 father-daughter play, “You Got Older,” which is running under A24’s new management at the Cherry Lane Theatre, the creators find glory in something ordinary: an adult child and an aging parent trying their best.

The story is simple: Mae (Alia Shawkat), a thirty-two-year-old lawyer, newly single and unemployed (she’d been dating her boss), has come home to rural Washington to stay with her widowed father, who’s being treated for a “weird, mysterious cancer.” Her mom died of cancer, too, years earlier. She’s trying to be responsible, to behave like a grownup, but being home makes her keyed-up, antsy, and she retreats into her sexual imagination for comfort. The play consists of a series of sharp, realistic dialogues broken up with bursts of surreality: Mae and her dad talking awkwardly in the garden; Mae at a local bar, sporting bright-red short shorts and showing a near-stranger her rash; and, now and then, a fantasy cowboy, who keeps threatening to tie Mae up, whether she likes it or not.

Shawkat, with her warm, amused eyes and her mop of curls, is a perfect carrier for Mae’s air of abjection, flopping around her bed like a horny, gloomy Raggedy Ann. She is particularly adroit at playing charmers whom people forgive, sometimes too easily, like the millennial trickster Dory on the TV series “Search Party.” But the whole production is smartly allied with that openhearted sensibility, down to Arnulfo Maldonado’s simple, homey scenic design, in which wood-panelled walls glide around to suggest a garden, a bar, a hospital, a Midwestern bedroom. Directed by Anne Kauffman, the show trusts its audience not to need much guidance: when the set abruptly shifts to reveal Mae’s three siblings, it’s thrilling how instantly believable their teasing bond is.

Still, the most remarkable performance at the Cherry Lane is by Peter Friedman, who plays the kind of father you rarely see in art: a good one. It’s a hard sort of acting to describe, a spectacle of humility and self-awareness, unshowy and confident. A businessman with a genial, chatty energy, Mae’s father, facing mortality, is eager to help his daughter to know him better, not as a child but as an adult, to create a closeness that she clearly craves but is frightened of. As she raises walls, he builds bridges—and she scrambles across, absorbing bits of wisdom, a few of which feel tied to her secret thoughts about control. At one point, he startles her by explaining that, unlike her, he’s not terrified of feeling helpless: “Like going to the dentist. I love that. You just lie back and open your mouth. What can you do?”

Late in the show, Friedman’s character plays his daughter the song “Firewood,” by Regina Spektor, a songwriter whose work—droll and ardent—shares a lot with Barron’s play. It’s his cancer theme song, he explains; her mom had also had one. “You guys were weird,” she tells him—it’s Mae’s reflex word, her way of shooing away excess feeling. “Some of the lyrics are a little overdramatic, but I think it’s a pretty good song,” he adds, excitedly; he wants her to listen. She is reluctant to do it, but then she does it anyway, absorbing the song’s rapturous optimism. The audience does, too: we listen to that song all the way through, feeling the time pass.

Wallace Shawn’s haunting “What We Did Before Our Moth Days,” directed by his long-term creative partner, André Gregory, is less a piñata play than it is a public autopsy, in which a family of erudite, self-possessed medical examiners stand over the corpse of their own legacy, poking it gently. There are four people implicated in the crime: Dick (Josh Hamilton), a rich, famous, charming, and extroverted New York novelist; Elle (Maria Dizzia), his saintly but quietly furious public-school-teacher wife, whom he fell for when he was sixteen; Tim, their squirrelly pervert of a son (played with the worst mustache in history by the delightful John Early), and Elaine (Hope Davis), Dick’s lover, a misanthrope with a clear-eyed understanding of her own choices.

It’s explosive material that, in a different artist’s hands, might have inspired a third-act screaming match over an Upper East Side dinner table, with snifters flying. Instead, Shawn stages his story as a panel of intimate testimonies, confided to us alone. The four characters sit on chairs, facing the audience. Sometimes they hold mugs. As the spotlight settles on each of them, that person unspools a monologue, a candid account of their origins, their desires and dreams, their galaxy of excuses and explanations. These stories slowly form a cracked family portrait, like a jigsaw puzzle. Are the characters speaking to us from beyond the grave? Perhaps. Overhead, images of moths float by—a reference to “moth day,” which, Dick confides, with a nostalgic smile, is the phrase he invented as a small child to describe the day we die, guided to the grave, “vaguely and flutteringly,” by blind moths. Then he tells us how it felt to die.

Going in, I’d assumed that “Moth Days” would be Shawn’s first whack at his own family piñata, one that involves this magazine. Shawn’s father was William Shawn, the longtime editor of The New Yorker, referred to by the staff, worshipfully, as Mr. Shawn; after his death, at eighty-five, Lillian Ross, one of his star reporters, wrote a memoir revealing their decades-long affair. “What We Did Before Our Moth Days” is, it’s true, a play about an adult son who is wrestling with his famous father’s secret life. A key story is strikingly similar to a story from Ross’s memoir: Elaine rushes to Elle’s apartment after Dick’s death, then meets Tim at the door, as if she were a vampire requesting permission to enter. But the parallels aren’t precise; they’re more like images in a mirror that’s slyly tilted to disorient the viewer. Dick, played by Hamilton with a boyish glee, is a chipper, gregarious sybarite, while Mr. Shawn was an introvert’s introvert. Similarly, Early’s dissolute failson feels less like a self-portrait than like a darkly comic deflection, a gargoyle-ish stand-in for his creator’s anxieties. (I was reminded of the rule that, when you write a roman à clef, you should give your enemy a small penis, since he’ll never say that it’s him.)

Instead of an attack, the play offers something more unsettling, a meditation on the allure of a bad life and the trap of a good one. Hamilton’s cheerful Dick tells a story out of Eden, or maybe “A Star Is Born”: by his account, he was an unconfident nobody until he met his decent, dazzling catch of a wife—and then, as he bloomed, she faded. While she buried herself in lonely motherhood, untouched glamour, and the martyrdom of do-gooder work, Dick went morally bankrupt—gradually, then suddenly. “Well, I’ve written these things, and people really like them, and I think I deserve a little reward for that,” he explains, beaming, in a hypnotic homage to cocktails, parties with famous strangers, the louche pleasures of Manhattan night clubs, freedoms available only among wicked, clever peers.

It should feel damning. Wallace Shawn’s own artistic path began with the O.G. piñata play, one in which children reproach parents for their lies, selfishness, and neglect: at thirteen, long before he learned the truth about his father, he attended Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” then insisted that his parents see it, too. His early plays were finger-pointing confrontations with the audience, and in “Aunt Dan and Lemon,” from 1985, “The Designated Mourner,” from 1996, and the 1990 monologue “The Fever”—which Shawn has been delivering twice a week at the same venue—he built a reputation as a caustic moralist, slicing through bourgeois hypocrisies. “Moth Days,” however, doesn’t take sides. It’s defiantly tender. Hamilton—playing a narcissist who radiates innocence even when he describes betrayal—is easy to love. So is Dizzia, as Dick’s wife, the dark cello to his bright violin, particularly when her eyes narrow and she unleashes her truest, rudest, strangest feelings. Davis is dryly funny as a cynic who introduces herself as someone who had “never been the sort of person about whom people would say, ‘You can always count on her in an emergency.’ ” Early, as the family’s dented nepo baby, is a peculiar fount of profane insight, twisted but touchingly damaged. As I watched, the word “seduction” kept coming to mind: even at their worst (incest fantasies, grooming), you want to listen to this quartet forever, which is a good thing, since the play is three hours long. Could it be shorter? Sure—the second and third acts could have been combined. But I was never bored, and more often was swept away by the text’s candor and depth, its merciless generosity.

A single scene late in the play breaks the spell of Shawn’s structure, when two characters turn to each other and acknowledge, with relief, the quality they share: an honest sleaziness, not a false decency. It’s an observation that feels like the creator’s most penetrating one—the idea that, looking back on life, it may mean more to be understood than to be virtuous. Dick’s life leaves scars, which don’t heal. But the love between cruel people is a real love, too. ♦

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“Love Story,” an FX series produced by Ryan Murphy, drops audiences straight into the lives of one of the most talked-about couples of the nineties: J.F.K., Jr., and the style icon Carolyn Bessette. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss how the show re-creates the look and fashion of the era in granular detail while reducing the relationship itself to a generic fairy tale. Despite its many flaws, the show has been embraced with a zeal that reflects the enduring allure of the Kennedys—often said to be the closest thing America has to a royal family. The hosts consider why this political dynasty has so persisted in the popular imagination, discussing everything from the work of the paparazzo Ron Galella to Oliver Stone’s “JFK” and Pablo Larrain’s “Jackie,” two very different treatments of the aftermath of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. “Love Story” ’s focus on style underscores how much the family’s legacy lives in aesthetics, which risks obscuring some of the darker chapters of its history. “It does seem like we have ever more efficiently stripped the Kennedys and their image, and their style, from any notions of political power,” Cunningham says. “The look of something and the sort of moral thrust of something are not always one to one working in parallel.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Love Story” (2026–)
“Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy,” by Elizabeth Beller
“How Can ‘Love Story’ Get Away with This?,” by Daryl Hannah (The New York Times)
“American Prince: JFK Jr.” (2025)
“Seinfeld” (1989-98)
“Jackie” (2016)
“The Kennedy Imprisonment,” by Garry Wills
The photography of Ron Galella
“JFK” (1991)
“A Battle with My Blood,” by Tatiana Schlossberg (The New Yorker)

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.

On February 28th, just hours after the United States and Israel struck Iran, Abdul Malik al-Houthi, the supreme leader of Yemen’s Houthi movement, gave a speech denouncing the attacks as “a blatant, criminal, and barbaric act targeting the Muslim Iranian people.” He expressed “complete solidarity” with Iran and urged the entire Muslim world to apply pressure, of all forms, on the U.S. and Israel. The following day, at his behest, tens of thousands of people in Yemen took to the streets to protest the killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. They carried portraits of the cleric and condemned America and Israel, using language that mirrored the Houthis’ motto: “God is great, death to America, death to Israel, curse on the Jews, victory to Islam.”

The Houthis, a Zaydi Shiite Islamist rebel group, which the U.S. has designated as a foreign terrorist organization, are among Iran’s most powerful and resilient allies. They are a key part of the so-called Axis of Resistance, an informal Iran-led military coalition in the Middle East. During his speech, al-Houthi suggested that the Houthis were ready to lend military support to Iran: “We are fully prepared for any necessary developments,” he said. And yet, as the war continues into its second week, the Houthis are essentially M.I.A.

Iran’s other proxies, meanwhile, have done little to bolster Tehran in the war. Hezbollah, the paramilitary group in Lebanon, got involved in the conflict, disregarding the state’s sovereignty and firing missiles and drones from Lebanese territory at an Israeli military site near Haifa. The projectiles fell short, but Israel carried out retaliatory strikes in Beirut and across Lebanon, killing at least six hundred people, including ninety-one children, injuring more than a thousand, and displacing some eight hundred thousand. In Iraq, pro-Iranian Shiite militias have attempted a series of small-scale drone and rocket attacks at Israel, and have targeted U.S. forces and personnel in Erbil and Baghdad, and in Jordan. But few of these have caused damage. “Their capabilities remain limited and not consequential at all,” Renad Mansour, a senior fellow and the project director of the Iraq Initiative at Chatham House, a London-based think tank, told me.

This was not what Iran envisioned when it began developing the Axis of Resistance, in the nineteen-eighties, pouring billions of dollars into cultivating a network that would help defend its borders, deter its enemies, and project influence across the region. The coalition started with Hezbollah, in 1982, which Iran helped establish in response to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. It eventually expanded to support Bashar al-Assad’s regime, in Syria; various Iraqi Shiite militias, such as the Popular Mobilization Forces; and Sunni militants, including Hamas. The Houthis, once a little-known insurgent group in northern Yemen, became a major military and political force after the Arab Spring, using nationwide unrest and government instability to seize large swaths of the country, including the capital, Sanaa. With the help of Iran, which provided training in addition to ballistic missiles and other advanced weaponry, the Houthis became adept at asymmetric warfare, using low-cost, high-impact methods like drones and rockets against more well-resourced militaries. With such tactics, they survived a years-long bombing campaign by a U.S.-backed, Saudi-led coalition seeking to reinstall Yemen’s elected government.

All of Iran’s proxies share a deep ideological hatred of Israel and America. “The logic of the proxies for Iran, primarily, was this idea of forward defense, which meant that, instead of fighting in Iran, let’s do our fighting in other areas,” Mansour explained. But now that Iran is engaged in “a direct fight against the U.S. and Israel and its interests across the region,” he continued, these allied groups are “less necessary.”

Still, the Houthis could be especially valuable to Iran during the current conflict, as the group has repeatedly demonstrated its ability to withstand U.S. and Israeli strikes. This includes two American-led campaigns against Yemen—first under the Biden Administration, in 2024, then under the Trump Administration, last year, which pummelled Houthi positions and weapons arsenals for months. Not only did the group remain intact but their survival may have bolstered their image in Yemen and their grip on the country.

Were the Houthis to get involved now, they could open several new fronts in the war at once. The group could fire drones and missiles at commercial ships in the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, as it has done before, shutting down a vital shipping lane that connects the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean via the Suez Canal and the Red Sea. Significant amounts of the world’s crude oil, liquefied natural gas, manufactured goods, electronics, and food flow through this passage. Shutting it down—coupled with Iran’s choking off the Strait of Hormuz—could suffocate global trade, cause oil and energy prices to soar even higher, and prompt stock-market crashes all over the world, putting added pressure on the Trump Administration and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to end the war. Already, some shippers are avoiding the Red Sea route, anticipating Houthi attacks. (Last spring, as the U.S. struck Yemen, the Houthis claimed to have launched missiles and drones at the U.S.S. Harry S. Truman, an American aircraft carrier in the Red Sea.) The Houthis could also fire long-range missiles at Israel, and target Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf nations—including their oil, energy, and economic infrastructure—from the south, as Iran strikes these countries from the north, in a joint pincer movement.

It’s possible that the plan is for the Houthis to join the conflict later on, if there is a long-drawn-out war, and if the Gulf countries, which so far have been focussed on protecting themselves from Iranian strikes, go on the offensive. (On Saturday, Masoud Pezeshkian, the Iranian President, apologized to the Gulf states for its strikes, but the attacks have persisted.) Mohammed al-Basha, a Middle East politics-and-security expert, told me that the Houthis have been readying themselves for action. In recent weeks, he and other analysts have been told that the Houthis have deployed missile launchers, drone-operating units, and military brigades throughout northern Yemen—from the Red Sea coastlines to the border with Saudi Arabia. The group is also said to be digging tunnels, building bunkers, and erecting barriers and other defensive structures in case of an attack by the United States and Israel. Ahmed Nagi, a senior analyst for Yemen for the International Crisis Group, told me that Iran and its proxies believe in “gradual escalation,” understanding that it is perhaps not “wise to use your wild cards all at once.” The Houthis are Iran’s biggest wild card. And so the fact that the group has not yet entered the war can only be seen as “a calculated choice,” one that has been “fully coördinated with the Iranians,” Nagi said. “They believe that Iran, for now, can manage the situation and face all these challenges alone.” But, if the conflict widens even more, he added, “the Houthis will jump in. They need some time to assess the situation before joining the fight.”

That need to assess speaks to the enormous shifts that are currently under way in the Middle East, as Israel and the U.S. remake the region. It also unveils the struggle within Iran’s constellation of proxies to remain relevant, as their primary benefactor faces its greatest existential threat since its war with Iraq in the nineteen-eighties. Their calculus on whether to enter the war is shaped by several questions: Can they survive U.S. and Israeli retaliation, including attacks targeting their senior leaders? Do they possess enough missiles and drones, and the ability to build or acquire more advanced weapons, to sustain a prolonged war and defense? Will they be weakened domestically by entering the war? And is there something to gain—politically, economically, or diplomatically—by avoiding conflict?

Last June, during the Twelve-Day War—when Israel attacked Iran and the U.S. later joined in, striking Iranian nuclear facilities—the answers to these questions persuaded Iran’s proxies to remain largely on the sidelines. By then, significant cracks in the Axis of Resistance had emerged. In 2020, an American drone strike had assassinated General Qassem Suleimani, who oversaw support for Iran’s proxies and was widely viewed as the theocracy’s second most powerful leader, after Khamenei. After Hamas attacked Israel, on October 7, 2023, triggering a broad Israeli military campaign in Gaza, Israel killed Hamas leaders and decimated its military capabilities. In Lebanon and parts of Syria, Israel detonated thousands of pagers of Hezbollah officials and bombed the group’s headquarters in southern Beirut, killing its leader, Hassan Nasrallah. In Syria, Israeli strikes killed senior commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, crippling Iran’s coördination and control. Iran was either unable or unwilling to help Hamas or Hezbollah fend off Israeli attacks. Nor did it help quell a rebel offensive that ousted the Assad dictatorship, in December, 2024. Iran largely withdrew its forces from Syria, ending more than a decade of Iranian influence over the country.

The Twelve-Day War showcased the U.S. and Israel’s military supremacy, but what was most unsettling to Iran’s proxies was the way in which Israel’s intelligence apparatus had infiltrated Iran, killing top security officials and nuclear scientists who were housed at high-security military complexes. Hezbollah, severely weakened and struggling to rebuild itself, didn’t join the conflict, nor did Iraq’s Shiite militias. The Houthis fired a few missiles at Israel early on and then turned silent; they had just emerged from their own conflict with the U.S., and Israel was in the midst of bombing Yemen and targeting senior Houthi commanders and officials. At the time, several regional experts told me that top security and political figures inside the Iraqi Shiite militias and the Houthis were limiting their use of technology, using burner phones and spending minimal time online to prevent Israel from tracking them.

This time around, Hezbollah got involved because “they feel that Iran is facing an existential war, and what happens to Iran is going to happen to them, so in a way they are intertwined in Hezbollah’s future,” Randa Slim, a program lead for the Middle East at the Stimson Center, told me. “Ideologically, they are bound to intervene once asked, and religiously they have a duty to intervene once the Supreme Leader is killed.” Khamenei was both Hezbollah’s political ally and its paramount spiritual guide; the group followed his religious rulings and used his authority to legitimize violent acts. And yet Hezbollah’s choice to plunge the country into war has fractured the group, which is now facing backlash from its own supporters, and from the Lebanese government. In Iraq, too, Iran’s allied militias are fragmented. Smaller ones have joined the war for ideological reasons and to avenge Khamenei’s death. But the Badr Organization, one of the largest Shiite militias and Iran’s oldest proxy in Iraq, has yet to get involved. Its leaders are part of the Iraqi government, and have access to lucrative oil contracts that are worth millions of dollars more now that oil prices have spiked, Mansour, the senior fellow at Chatham House, told me. “All these groups, including the Houthis, they’re all in survival mode,” he went on, “and they’re all just, from their perspectives, pragmatically trying to understand what the best decisions would be.”

The Houthis, at least at the moment, have more to gain from staying out of the war. As the Axis of Resistance has weakened, they’ve grown in stature. When the war in Gaza erupted, the Houthis fired ballistic missiles and drones at Israel, in solidarity with the Palestinians, and imposed their chokehold on Red Sea shipping lanes. Last May, in a ceasefire deal following nearly two months of U.S. aerial assaults, the Houthis agreed to stop targeting American ships—but not Israeli ones. President Trump claimed victory, whereas the Houthis declared it was the U.S. that had backed down, strengthening their resistance credentials.

Despite their bravado, the Houthis have suffered significant losses during their conflict with Israel. In late August, Israel struck Sanaa, killing senior Houthi figures, including the group’s Prime Minister and several other ministers. In October, the group announced that its military chief of staff, Muhammad Abd al-Karim al-Ghamari, a popular figure in the country, had also been killed in the strikes. Large crowds turned out for his state funeral, and he still appears on billboards in the Yemeni capital, a constant reminder of how much the Houthis have lost. Their recent buildup of defenses is likely less about getting ready to support Iran and more about preventing Israel and the U.S. from killing their supreme leader. After Khamenei and Nasrallah, “Abdul Malik al-Houthi is the long-lasting leader that is still standing from that generation,” Basha said.

The Houthis are also facing significant domestic challenges. Yemen’s economy is in tatters, and the country is facing a dire humanitarian crisis. There are cash shortages, and the salaries for civil servants haven’t been paid out, even for many Houthi fighters. During this holy fasting month of Ramadan, many Yemenis can hardly afford basic items, sparking widespread anger at the Houthi authorities, who are also under pressure from U.S. and European sanctions. Politically, too, there are concerns. Saudi Arabia is seeking to unify anti-Houthi forces in southern Yemen following the recent military withdrawal of the United Arab Emirates and the implosion of a key but divisive militia it backed. The Houthis are also seeking billions of dollars from Saudi Arabia to pay salaries and other government expenses as part of a stalled political agreement. They could threaten to attack in order to extract concessions from the kingdom, but targeting Saudi Arabia on behalf of Iran could prove unwise. The Houthis are concerned about the day after, Nagi, of the International Crisis Group, said. Even if they don’t join the war, they could become targets of the U.S. and Israel later, or face harsher sanctions should Iran become significantly weakened or were the regime to collapse. “They have tough options, and each option is worse than the other,” Nagi said.

Unlike Hezbollah and the Iraqi militias, the Houthis are not politically beholden to Iran. And, unlike many Shiites around the world, they didn’t view Khamenei as their supreme religious authority; that role is filled by Abdul Malik al-Houthi and his ancestors. (The Houthis believe in Zaydism, a branch of Shia Islam that emerged in the eighth century, whose followers are almost exclusively found in Yemen.) Iran may have positioned the Houthis as a regional player that can exert pressure on Iran’s neighbors, but the Houthis have always put their own interests first. “It’s a mutually beneficial relationship, but it’s transactional in its nature,” Slim told me.

During the past few years, the Houthis have become less reliant on Iran for weapons, smuggling in drone components from Chinese companies and small arms from the Horn of Africa. Nevertheless, without Iran’s help, the Houthis would not be the force they are today. And so the rhetorical support for Iran remains fierce and loud—on the streets, on television, and on social media. On March 5th, in another televised speech, Abdul Malik al-Houthi said, “Our fingers are on the trigger, ready to respond at any moment should developments warrant it.” But if the Houthis do respond, it won’t just be to help Iran—it’ll be to help themselves. “I don’t know the extent to which Iran could make the Houthis do something they don’t ultimately want to anymore,” Mansour said. “Iran is not the same Iran from more than a decade ago, and the Houthis aren’t the same Houthis from back then. The power balance has shifted.” ♦

Like other young women she knew who lived on the South Side of Chicago, Marimar Martinez carried a handgun at the bottom of her purse. The gun, a Smith & Wesson pistol for which she had a concealed-carry license, was usually strapped into a neon-pink harness. “It’s a girl gun,” she told me recently. Martinez is thirty-one and works as a teaching assistant at a Montessori school. She thought of herself as a trusting person who’d help “literally anybody,” even strangers. But in 2020, after her sister was the victim of an attempted carjacking, she decided that a gun would be a good idea. The man at the gun shop looked at Martinez, a small woman with round eyes and rosy cheeks, and recommended the pistol, which fit nicely in her hands. She liked to take the gun with her on runs in the forest preserve, where the trails could be lonely. She had never fired the gun outside of a shooting range. But she liked knowing that it was there at the bottom of her bag, for her protection.

That’s where the gun was on Saturday, October 4, 2025. Martinez woke up to a warm, sunlit morning. She filled a wading pool in the yard for her two dogs, Pancho and Gordo, then sorted through old clothes and shoes to donate to a nearby church. She loaded them in the back of her Nissan Rogue and put her purse on the seat beside her. She was almost at the church when she noticed a silver Chevy Tahoe in the road ahead of her. “I was just, like, Something’s not right,” she said. “I know it’s them.”

President Donald Trump had recently begun deploying immigration officers to cities across the country. Four weeks earlier, agents had arrived in Chicago with military fatigues, face masks, armored vehicles, and rifles. Helicopters and drones whirred overhead. The Department of Homeland Security declared this Operation Midway Blitz. It was among the first of several campaigns targeting, the government said, criminals living in the country illegally—though, according to available data, most of the people arrested had no criminal history. Soon, protesters began following agents, recording them, and, at points, attempted to block the entrance of an ICE facility. Agents responded with force, using tear gas and rubber bullets.

Martinez, a U.S. citizen who came from a family of Mexican immigrants, had not attended the protests in Chicago. But she had been following ICE’s activity in the city, mostly through dedicated Facebook pages. She knew that agents took measures to disguise their vehicles. So when she saw the Tahoe, which had tinted back windows, a Kentucky license plate, and a light-up Uber decal on the front windshield, she decided to follow it. “La migra! La migra!” she shouted out her window, using slang for ICE. She honked her horn repeatedly. At one point, she began to record a Facebook live stream in which you can hear her yelling, her manicured almond nails wrapped around the steering wheel.

Charles Exum, a Border Patrol agent of more than twenty years, was driving the Tahoe, with two agents in the back seat. He could hear Martinez shouting, and, when he looked in his mirror, saw a pink phone raised at his vehicle. Exum had a tan overshirt on and, he said later in federal court, in an effort to blend in he had taken off his tactical vest and its attached body camera. A pack of Marlboro Lights rested on the center console. Exum later told the F.B.I. that Martinez had been following him for ten to fifteen minutes, and was “inches from my bumper.” Another civilian vehicle, a black GMC Envoy, was nearby. By the time one of the agents in the back of the Tahoe turned on his body camera, at 10:26 A.M., they appeared to be bracing for confrontation. One was trying to call 911, though no one seemed to answer. Both agents in the back seat held guns in their hands. One already had his finger on the trigger. Multiple cars were honking as the Tahoe headed north on Kedzie Avenue. “Do something, bitch,” an agent said. Another said, “It’s time to get aggressive and get the fuck out, ’cuz they’re trying to box us in.”

“Watch out.”

“If she hits us . . .”

Martinez has said she was not trying to hit anyone. She wanted to follow the agents, alerting people to their presence, until they eventually left the neighborhood. But, inside the Tahoe, the agents felt the situation was escalating. “We’re gonna make contact, and we’re boxed in,” one said. Video footage from a nearby security camera shows open road in front of the Tahoe, though agents later said that they felt hemmed in by the Rogue and by the black GMC. A moment later, the sides of the Rogue and the Tahoe collided. The body-camera footage shows Exum yanking the wheel left, toward the Rogue, then right. Responsibility for the collision is contested. Exum says Martinez hit him first, before he turned into the Rogue. Martinez says he hit her, and that the body-camera footage proves it. But there is no video showing exactly what took place. Seconds later, Exum stopped his car ahead of Martinez. He opened the driver’s side door with his left hand, a pistol in his right.

Martinez saw him raise his gun. Afraid for her life, she said, she hunched her head between her shoulders, her hands on the wheel, and tried to drive away to safety. Exum shouted, “Get down!” He later said that he wasn’t sure why he said this, but that he believed that Martinez was trying to hit him with her car. At 10:29 A.M., he fired at Martinez five times.

She was hit once in her right arm, once in the chest, and three times in the legs. At first, she thought she’d been hit with pepper balls or rubber bullets. Then she saw how much blood there was. She kept driving, holding the wheel with her injured arm and applying pressure to her wounds with the other hand. At 10:30 A.M., she called 911. “Please!” she said, groaning. She turned into a truck stop, parked, and tried to walk inside, holding her phone. She thought of the Western movies she had seen with her father, where characters tied off their wounds to stop the bleeding. “Do you have a bandanna?” she asked the men working inside.

“Hello, ma’am?” the 911 dispatcher asked on the phone. “Do you know who shot you?”

“Oh, my God, I feel like I’m going to faint,” she said.

The dispatcher asked about the shooter six more times. Eventually, Martinez yelled into the phone, “ICE agent shot me!” She sat down in the store, putting her head against the wall and whimpering into the phone. She watched the light outside get brighter. Eventually, she passed out.

When federal law-enforcement officers arrived to search the Rogue, which was covered in blood, they found the gun in its pink holster in her purse. It didn’t matter that she had never touched it. The gun soon became part of a surreal composite image of Martinez presented by the Trump Administration as fact. Within hours, D.H.S. described her as armed and dangerous, a “domestic terrorist.” Tricia McLaughlin, a D.H.S. spokesperson, wrote on social media that Martinez had “rammed” agents with her car while “armed with a semi-automatic weapon.” The statement about the gun was technically true—most modern pistols are—but misleading. McLaughlin also said that Martinez had recently written a post on social media saying, “Hey to all my gang let’s fuck those mother fuckers up, don’t let them take anyone.” But Martinez had never posted this; the quote, it turned out, came from another person’s Facebook account. Kash Patel, the director of the F.B.I., shared a video of a black S.U.V. aggressively ramming an agent’s truck, attributing the act to Martinez. But the S.U.V. wasn’t her car, and the video was from an unrelated incident. These posts remain online.

Martinez was charged with assaulting, impeding, and interfering with a federal law-enforcement officer. She faced twenty years in prison. By the time she woke up at a hospital, hours later, the government’s version of the story had already spread. She saw federal officers in her room, and feared that one of them was the man who had just shot her. She asked a nurse if she could keep them away, but the nurse said that there was nothing she could do. “Sorry,” Martinez remembered her saying. “You should have never rammed them.”

One reason we know so much about this case is that Martinez recently lobbied a judge to unseal the evidence. She had watched, in the months following her own shooting, as federal agents shot three people in Minneapolis, all of whom were then blamed for inciting the violence. Two of the victims were dead. “I was there in their shoes, and I have a voice,” Martinez said. “Something that they don’t have.” The evidence includes body-camera footage, F.B.I. reports, interview summaries, and dozens of text messages. Together, the material gives us the most complete picture yet of a D.H.S. shooting and its aftermath. Martinez’s lawyer, Christopher Parente, believes that her case should be studied as a “playbook” for D.H.S. violence. “She’s one of the few people who has survived the bullets and can speak out,” he told me.

Last year, the Trump Administration began pushing ICE to start making three thousand arrests a day. In service of that goal, agents have spent the last nine months roving unfamiliar cities—New Orleans, Charlotte, Minneapolis—wearing face masks and conducting raids. Fear alone has been enough to make these operations dangerous. Last August, in Los Angeles County, when agents appeared near a Home Depot in Monrovia, a day laborer fled on foot into the freeway and was struck and killed by a car. The raids have also produced a string of outrages: a six-month-old baby exposed to tear gas; a pastor shot in the head with a pepper ball; a man dragged outside in sub-freezing temperatures, wearing only his underwear, after being mistaken for a sex offender. With every new shock, the animus between protesters and agents has grown worse. Last summer, Kristi Noem, then the Secretary of Homeland Security, said that D.H.S. considers “violence” against agents to be anything that threatens their safety, including “videotaping them.”

Through interactions caught on video, the anger has trickled into public view. A masked agent, in one video, screams at a man in Minneapolis, “Stop fucking following us!” In another, a woman tells an agent, “I hope you have a terrible day.” There is a sense, watching some of the videos, that the agents feel hunted. In its press releases, D.H.S. repeatedly claims that assaults against agents have increased by more than a thousand per cent. (An NPR analysis of court records last fall found the increase of alleged assaults may be closer to twenty-five per cent.) The agency did not provide a full account of the incidents it has been tracking, but it did send a list of several examples, including photos of an officer’s finger that had been “bit off,” an officer with an open wound on the back of his head, and another missing a chunk of his upper lip. Protesters have thrown rocks, set off fireworks, and followed agents to their hotels. In response, D.H.S. leaders have reinforced agents’ sense of tribalism. Gregory Bovino, a Border Patrol leader who became the face of Trump’s immigration-enforcement operations until he was sidelined earlier this year, was captured on video giving a pep talk to a huddle of agents in Los Angeles. “Arrest as many people that touch you as you want to. Those are the general orders, all the way to the top,” Bovino had told the agents. “It’s all about us now. It ain’t about them.”

“Whose city is it, chief?” an agent asked.

Bovino replied, “This is our fucking city.”

D.H.S. has raced to hire new, inexperienced agents, holding ICE career fairs and putting up Customs and Border Protection tables at rodeos and sporting expos. But even for longtime Border Patrol agents, who are trained at an academy in the deserts of New Mexico and stationed along the northern and southern borders, high-density cities are unfamiliar terrain. “They don't have experience working in an urban environment,” John Sandweg, who served as acting director of ICE during the Obama Administration, told me. “You don’t have protesters out there watching you.” To send those agents into politically fraught urban environments—“well, it’s very dangerous,” he said.

Over the past year, there have been at least seventeen D.H.S. shootings, four of them fatal. After many of them, Trump officials moved quickly to justify the shooting and accuse the victim of attacking agents, all before an investigation had taken place. In ten of the thirteen shootings where the victims survived, they faced felony charges. In five of those cases, the charges were either dropped or dismissed. Just a few days into Operation Midway Blitz, an ICE agent shot and killed Silverio Villegas González, a Mexican man with only traffic violations on his record. Afterward, D.H.S. said that González had driven his car at agents, hitting and dragging one of the officers “a significant distance” and leaving him “seriously injured.” Video from the scene later showed two agents on either side of González’s car as he began to reverse his vehicle. Neither agent appears to have been hit, though, in body camera footage, one says he was dragged “a little bit” and describes his injuries as “nothing major.” D.H.S. has not publicly amended its account of the shooting.

In January, in Minneapolis, Renee Good, a thirty-seven-year-old mother, was driving home from a school drop-off with her partner when she saw federal agents, and stopped in the street. An agent shot and killed her as she tried to drive away. Two hours later, D.H.S. issued a statement accusing her of trying to run the agent over, in an “act of domestic terrorism.” That afternoon, Trump also posted online that Good “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer.” Video later showed Good turning her wheel away from the agent who shot her. Two weeks later, Trump said that he had learned that Good’s father was a “tremendous Trump fan,” and noted that agents were going to “make mistakes.” But he left his earlier statements online.

Less than three weeks later, Alex Pretti, a nurse, was on the south side of Minneapolis filming agents with his cellphone. A handgun, for which he had a permit, was holstered at his hip. Video showed that agents pushed him to his knees, disarmed him, and then shot him. But a few hours later, Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s immigration policy, called Pretti a “domestic terrorist” who had tried to “assassinate” an officer. Pretti’s parents learned of their son’s death when an Associated Press reporter called them. “Please get the truth out about our son. He was a good man,” they wrote in a statement. This appeal produced testimonials, pictures of Pretti with his mountain bike, and a video of Pretti eulogizing a veteran over his hospital bed. But it was hard to imagine any of that having as much reach as the label “domestic terrorist.”

Before October 4th, Marimar Martinez lived a quiet life in Chicago. Her parents had come to the United States from Durango, Mexico, in the early nineties. The journey took fifteen days. They made most of it on foot, walking day and night with little rest. They thought, at points, that they might not survive. In Chicago, Martinez’s father picked up minimum-wage jobs. Her parents, who eventually became citizens, struggled at first to pay for formula and diapers. But they lived in a two-story home with aunts, uncles, and cousins, who helped them get by. For a time, Martinez worked at a salon, but she found her job at the Montessori school more fulfilling. By her thirties, she was in a mode of “self-care.” This meant two-hour sessions at the gym, long runs, and horseback riding on the weekends. “I was just doing me,” she said.

What she saw of D.H.S. activity in Chicago disturbed her. She had two friends who were taken, and she knew people who were scared to leave their homes. She was helping some of those people when she could, by buying groceries or monitoring “ICE watch” Facebook pages. Five days before Martinez was shot, a C.B.P. intelligence team shared her name, picture, and social-media account with agents in Chicago, saying that the information had been verified with D.H.S. databases. (In a statement, an unnamed D.H.S. spokesperson wrote, “There is NO database of ‘domestic terrorists’ run by DHS,” but that the agency does monitor and investigate threats.) Martinez appeared to have been flagged because of a post she had recirculated from one of the Facebook groups she followed, which claimed that a YouTuber was working as an agent in Operation Midway Blitz. Martinez shared the post and commented, “They found him lol.” The intelligence report said that Martinez was “encouraging the doxxing” of the agent.

Not much is publicly known about Exum. In body-camera footage, his face is blurred, and he speaks in a thick, clipped drawl. (He did not respond to a request for comment for this piece; D.H.S. also declined a request for an interview.) He had spent almost twenty years at a Border Patrol station in Maine, where agents were responsible for monitoring more than two hundred miles of the northern border and coastline. In remote areas, this could require snowshoes, snowmobiles, and A.T.V.s. Exum was a supervisor there: he made schedules for subordinate agents, dealt with disciplinary issues, approved time sheets, and once spoke to a Maine newspaper about “the common goal of making people safer.” Chicago was not his usual environment for doing this. Exum had driven the Tahoe, his government-issued vehicle, to the city thirty days earlier and was just a few days shy of going home. That day, his Tahoe had been disguised with both an Uber decal and an out-of-state license plate. (If a car was captured on video, it was common to swap the plates.) “There had been a lot of targeting of agents,” he said later, in federal court.

A few minutes after the shooting, more agents arrived on the scene. A siren blared and cars were honking. “Nobody fucking wants you here!” a woman screamed. “They’re shooting at people!” The agents seemed unbothered. Exum turned on his body camera, armed himself with an M-4 rifle, and stood quietly on the grass. In the footage, we see what Exum sees: clusters of agents talking among themselves, a cloudless sky. One agent asked if the woman had been shooting at him. “No, I was shooting,” Exum said. “She came forward. And that’s when I opened up on her.”

At points, Exum appeared to examine the damage to the side of the Tahoe. “Go ahead and sit down in the back,” an agent told him, eight minutes after the shooting. “Just lean on the back.” But Exum refused. “Oh, I’m good. I’m good, bro,” he said. He pointed to the side of the car. “This sucks, but . . .” Later, he testified about his fondness for the car. On Kedzie Avenue, he told the agent, “Finally get a good ride.” Ten minutes later, he opened and shut the front door and tested out the window controls. To himself, he said, “Finally got a good Tahoe.”

Later, in court, Exum testified that he “did what I had to do to save my life.” In body-camera footage from the moments leading up to the shooting, the agents seemed to believe they were in real danger. Afterward, a strange calm settled over the scene. “I don’t know if I hit her or not,” he said, sounding a bit dazed. “I got, fuck, five to seven rounds off at her?” At another point, one agent asked another, with startling casualness, “Good hits? Any hits?” Exum had just lit a cigarette and was telling another colleague about the shooting when an agent walked over and told him to stop. “Just no statements. You keep your mouth shut,” another agent told him soon after. “Don’t go anywhere. Don’t let other people come to you.”

Meanwhile, news of the shooting was rippling through the neighborhood. “Fuck you, motherfucker!” a man shouted as he drove by in his car. Later that day, a protest gathered at the site of the shooting. A smaller one formed near the truck stop where Martinez had collapsed. By then, six armed agents were milling about the parking lot. When Martinez had first come through the doors, the workers inside had rushed to help. “Sientate, sientate, sientate,” they can be heard saying on the 911 call. Sit, sit, sit. The paramedics had removed one of the bullets from Martinez’s arm, leaving it behind, along with bloody rags. An F.B.I. report later noted how careful the store manager had been not to touch the bullet, arranging pieces of tape and chairs around it to create a barrier. Still, just before 1 P.M., the shop received its first threatening phone call. The caller was angry that the workers had let ICE agents into their parking lot. “You’re going to have a bad day,” the caller said.

About an hour later, Exum wrote to a Signal group of fellow-agents called “Posse Chat,” which he described as a kind of “support group”: “Oh my lord man, it’s been a hell of a day. Watch the news and yes that was me.” As the day went on, his messages became more relaxed, even proud. “I have a great new scenario to add to our training,” he wrote. An agent responded with a “surprise” emoji. That evening, he sent a photo he’d taken of an exchange between two other agents about where his bullets had landed on Martinez. “Damn!!! FAFO,” one of the agents wrote back, using an acronym for “Fuck around and find out,” which has become popular inside the Trump Administration. “I leave for a few weeks and it turns into Iraq.” The agent added a crying-laughing emoji. Exum wrote to Posse Chat, “This came from one of the big dogs phones.” He also sent the exchange to his brother, because, as he later explained to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, they were competitive with one another about shooting accuracy. “They call this Chiraq now,” he said. His brother replied, “Damnit man. Good shootin.” Exum wrote back, “lol, gracias,” and then, minutes later, “Sweet. My 15 mins of fame. Lmao.”

No one in D.H.S. seems to have been worried about Exum’s actions. A few hours after the shooting, Bovino sent him an e-mail congratulating him. “I’d like to extend an offer for you to extend your retirement beyond age 57,” he wrote. “In light of your excellent service in Chicago, you have much yet left to do!!” Exum sent it to his wife, along with another congratulatory message he had received: “You are a legend among agents you better fuckin know that. Beers on me when I see you at training.” Within a few days, Exum was sending links around about the shooting. “I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book boys,” he wrote to Posse Chat, referring to five bullet holes and two exit wounds in Martinez’s body. “Are they supportive?” one agent asked. “Big time. Everyone has been including Chief Bovino, Chief Banks, Sec Noem and El Jefe himself . . . according to Bovino,” he said, referring to top Administration officials. (I asked D.H.S. whether “El Jefe” referred to Trump, but the agency did not respond.)

The hospital was the first time Martinez heard that she had allegedly “rammed” the officers’ car. “I was, like, ‘ram?’ What do you mean ram?” she said. “I got hit.” It felt as if the events as she understood them were being overwritten by another set of events entirely. Martinez’s chest, arms, and legs were wrapped in bandages. She was read her Miranda rights. After a few hours, she was taken to an F.B.I. field office. She was handed her cellphone so she could write down her parents’ phone numbers; she was still in shock and surprised to find she couldn’t remember them. The phone was covered in dried blood.

The next day, she was put in a jail cell. She met a woman there who had been arrested for allegedly assaulting a federal officer. The woman told Martinez that she’d gone to a protest because “some girl got shot.” Martinez realized that she was that girl. As she was being released, she saw a story about herself on the local news. They played the video of the black S.U.V. that wasn’t hers. They used the words “domestic terrorist.” The phrase made her think of “somebody who builds bombs,” she told me, or “Osama bin Laden’s daughter.”

As the weeks passed, Martinez began physical therapy and went back to work. At the Montessori school, she switched from infants to preschoolers, who were easier to handle with her injuries. Her hands had lasting damage—cramps and pains that got worse as the temperature outside got colder. She deactivated her Facebook, because, after it was mentioned in a D.H.S. press release, it had filled with hateful comments. “Hi, bitch, you should die,” one read.

At home, her mother seemed anxious and depressed. She had fainting spells. When her daughter tried to leave the house, she would call her back inside. She began to report aches in her body in the same places where Martinez had been shot. “I think I’m getting your pain instead,” she said. At night, Martinez lay awake picturing an agent in the middle of the road raising his gun. At points, the government’s narrative about her became even more extreme. In a filing to the Supreme Court, on October 17th, Trump’s Solicitor General described the collision as a “carefully orchestrated ambush” involving ten civilian vehicles. At times, Martinez’s sense of disorientation became so intense that she would check the bullet wounds on her body to make sure they were real.

Her case seemed strong. Martinez hadn’t been part of a “convoy of civilian vehicles,” as the initial complaint claimed. The cause of the collision was disputed. There was no evidence that Martinez had tried to hit Exum with her car. Two of Exum’s bullets had pierced the side of her car, suggesting, her lawyers said, that he continued to fire his gun after the Nissan Rogue was already past him. A few days after the shooting, Exum had driven the Tahoe back to Maine, where the scuff marks on the car—the best evidence of the crash—were buffed out by a C.B.P. mechanic. (Exum later said that he hadn’t requested this.) In November, Exum returned to Chicago for an evidentiary hearing. In the courtroom, Martinez heard him speak coolly about his skill with a gun. “I’m a firearms instructor,” Exum said. “I take pride in my shooting skills.” He said that he hadn’t known that Martinez was a citizen. “I do now,” he said.

Then, days later, the government asked to drop the case. The judge dismissed the charges with prejudice, meaning that the case cannot be retried. It was an abrupt reversal. “Put that in your books, Exum,” Martinez said in front of television cameras in the courthouse lobby. Still, that day, D.H.S. released another statement calling Martinez a domestic terrorist. The next night, she went to dinner with the woman she had met in jail. Martinez had remembered her being “so bubbly, so full of energy.” Now the woman seemed changed. She told Martinez that, although the charges against her had been dropped, she was struggling. At times, she was on high alert that she would encounter federal agents again. Martinez went home that night but was unable to sleep.

Marimar Martinez shows some of her bullet wounds from the shooting.Photograph by Akilah Townsend for The New Yorker

This is one of several impacts of a D.H.S. shooting: injuries, P.T.S.D., grief over the loss of a family member. But there is another that is more difficult to track. These cases have left people trying to recover their reputations and, with them, a sense of reality. Once the truth has been distorted, it is not so easy to repair. Luke Ganger, Renee Good’s brother, recently said that the most important thing he can do, now that his sister is gone, is help the country understand “who Nae is.” Daniel Rascon, a twenty-three-year-old man in California, was in a car with his fiancée’s father and brother when agents surrounded their vehicle. As the family tried to drive away, an agent fired at their car. Later, agents came to Rascon’s home and detained his fiancée’s father. The government charged Rascon with assaulting a federal officer, alleging that he had driven at agents. The charges have since been dropped. But Rascon has asked how the family is supposed to “operate normally in the world.” In Minneapolis, a Venezuelan man, Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, was shot in the leg. D.H.S. quickly accused him of attacking agents. Four weeks later, the charges against him were dropped. Todd Lyons, the acting director of ICE, said that two agents made “false statements” about the shooting. The agents have been placed on leave. But D.H.S. has not provided an updated account of what happened.

In cases that are still pending, there is even less that defendants can do to combat a D.H.S. narrative. On October 30th, Carlos Jimenez, a twenty-five-year-old who lives outside of Los Angeles, approached a group of D.H.S agents to warn them that a group of schoolchildren would soon be arriving at a nearby bus stop. According to his lawyer, Jimenez was trying to encourage the agents to wrap up before the kids arrived. After being told to leave, Jimenez tried to do a three-point turn. D.H.S. said that he attempted to “run officers over by reversing directly at them without stopping.” An agent fired through Jimenez’s back passenger-side window, hitting him in the back shoulder. D.H.S. said that the officer fired defensively, “fearing for his life.” Jimenez has not spoken publicly about the shooting. He has been advised to wait until his trial. Even if he wins his case, or if the charges are dropped before a trial begins, his lawyer, Greg Jackson, told me, “I don’t anticipate this Administration ever apologizing or retracting their statements. The truth does not matter.”

In January, Aliya Rahman, a forty-three-year-old Bangladeshi American, was dragged from her car by agents in Minneapolis while she yelled, “I’m disabled!” Later, as video of the incident spread online, D.H.S. called Rahman an “agitator” who had ignored an officer’s commands and was arrested for obstruction. Rahman says that she had been driving to a doctor’s appointment when she found herself in the middle of a chaotic ICE enforcement operation. “I was not trying to be there at all,” she told me. Rahman is a security software engineer and likes to study disinformation patterns. She has learned that even when multiple “corrections” are made to an account, it isn’t necessarily enough to change people’s beliefs about what happened. She told me that being the subject of one of these viral clashes is like “being in a time capsule that just exploded.” A single encounter will follow her online for the rest of her life. “People can look at those same facts and be, like, ‘This person is a nightmare criminal liar’ or ‘This person stood up for something.’ ”

Recently, I met Martinez at a federal courthouse in Chicago’s Loop. She stood in the quiet, carpeted room in a black pants suit and a gold-chain necklace. She was there to ask a judge to unseal the evidence in the case, in the hopes of proving that she was not the person the government said she was. Sometimes Martinez spoke proudly of her actions. She had been trying to defend her community. She had fought her case and then fought to make the evidence public. When she looked at it this way, she said, she felt like Wonder Woman. But there were other days when she felt less sure. On those days, she has been holding “little meetings in my head,” she said. She tells herself that she was not an armed aggressor who had set out to ambush agents on Kedzie Avenue. She was not the driver of the black S.U.V. in the video. She had never posted, “Let’s fuck those mother fuckers up.”

In the courtroom, the judge ruled that almost all of the evidence in the case should be unsealed, to help Martinez clear her name. “Here is what I struggle with,” the judge said. “I don’t understand why the United States government, after being given many, many opportunities to do so, has expressed zero concern about the sullying of Ms. Martinez’s reputation.” After the hearing, Martinez was quiet. A photographer followed her outside as she walked the frozen sidewalks back to her lawyer’s office. Upstairs, she collapsed into a chair. Parente couldn’t believe the judge had ruled so overwhelmingly in his client’s favor. “A federal judge saying all those great things about you?” Very rare, he said. Martinez nodded. It was a cold day, the kind that made her hand hurt. She seemed exhausted. Soon, they planned to file a civil lawsuit against the government, which would likely last for months. Martinez shrugged. “What can I do?” she said. “I’m still here. I’m still living.” ♦

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The New Yorker staff writer Jonathan Blitzer joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss Kristi Noem’s removal from her post as Secretary of Homeland Security. They talk about the lead-up to her firing—which included accusations of fiscal mismanagement and self-promotion—and her controversial tenure as the head of one of the largest and most powerful departments during Donald Trump’s second Presidential term. They also explore the history and evolution of the Department of Homeland Security and how its founding in the wake of the September 11th attacks laid the groundwork for the sweeping—and, according to some legal experts, unconstitutional—powers it wields today.

This week’s reading:

• “Kristi Noem’s Fireable Offenses,” by Jonathan Blitzer
• “How Donald Trump’s Iran War Is Destabilizing the Gulf,” by Isaac Chotiner
• “The Zombie Regulator,” by E. Tammy Kim
• “What the Selection of Iran’s New Leader Might Mean for the War,” by Robin Wright
• “The G.O.P.’s Latest Voter-Suppression Plan,” by Sue Halpern

Tune in to The Political Scene wherever you get your podcasts.